Tag: do over

At this time I honestly don’t know exactly what the lesson is, but I figure that as a write, the idea will come to me.

When we had finished recording high school level, it was time to upload the activities that were related to each lesson. They consisted of a Blog entry, some questions about that blog entry, interactive activities, an exam at the end of the lesson and frequently asked questions.
We had to manually upload every single letter of those activities. They hadn’t developed a way to automatically upload this information (they still haven’t). Also, we had a system that didn’t allow right-clic options. So we had to manually select a piece of text, type Ctrl-C, then go to the system window and Ctrl-V the information on to it.

This was very tedious work. Imagine having to copy and paste 25 questions, then their possible answers (3 at least) for 30 something lessons. Then frequently asked questions were about 5 per lesson (times 30 as well). In short, it was quite a lot of information to copy and paste manually.
And, as always, they wanted this done yesterday. So, their idea to get this done quickly? Everyone do it.

We divided the work. Or distributed rather. One person got 5 exams to upload and someone else got 10 exams of that same subject.
In this way, one subject was being managed by two or three people at the same time.

And it was done like that, no questions asked, just upload everything as quickly as you can. Of course, something done in haste has a high chance of resulting with poor quality.
And it did.
Files got lost and there were many mistakes made. If a physics teacher was uploading a History test, it would have been difficult for him to spot a mistake in context or an important date. The same happend with biology teachers that uploaded information for math or calculus.

It got done quickly, yes. But at the cost of quality. To this day I still don’t understand why that had to be done so quickly, since there weren’t any students enrolled. One might think that they wanted to save expenses, but the difference in doing it with more care would have been a couple of days. Maybe a week.

And we ended up re-doing this a few months later, when there wasn’t much to do. Maybe this was their plan all along, to do the exact same thing two times.
So what was the point of doing everything in a hurry? Just the fact of being able to say ‘it’s done’ (even if we don’t know what the hell we uploaded because there were so many people involved in the process). Again, the lack of organization was evident.

Therefore, one more time: organize, organize, organize. That is the lesson. Even if we had to do something quickly, nothing would have happened if we had taken a couple of hours trying to figure out the best way to get the work done.
A two hour salary of three or four people is much cheaper than the salary of 15 people during three weeks. So spend some time planning and figuring out WHAT you need to get done and HOW to do it. Also consider the possible implications or consequences. This alone can save a few headaches. Then go ahead and act.